U.S. e-commerce platform ArtSugar receives $500,000 in seed round financing, focusing on affordable

Equal rights in art

According to PR Newswire, ArtSugar, a cheap home improvement art e-commerce platform, has recently announced a $500,000 seed round of financing. This round is exclusively invested by Curate Capital, which focuses on female founder projects. It is reported that this round of funds will be mainly used for product line expansion, artist cooperation network expansion, improvement of operational capabilities and technology optimization.

ArtSugar was founded by Alix Greenberg in 2017. Starting from the concept of "Art Equality", ArtSugar hopes to provide consumers with access to affordable artworks. The platform exclusively selects cheap art prints, sculptures and household items from popular artists on Instagram, seeks a middle ground between cheap decorations and high-end artworks produced in supermarkets, and donates part of the proceeds to God's Love We Deliver, Gyrl Wonder and The Trevor Charities such as Project.

ArtSugar founder Alix Greenberg has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Master's degree from Christie's. Before founding ArtSugar in 2017, Greenberg worked at Christie's and also worked in art galleries.

The inspiration for the founding of ArtSugar came from Greenberg's witness to the selection difficulties encountered by millennials and Generation Z when buying home improvement art: original works on the market are scattered in channels, and most of them are expensive. In addition, Greenberg also noticed that even if emerging artists who have not settled in galleries have a large number of followers on social media, they still lack a channel to market. The reason is that logistics and marketing investments are unaffordable for individual artists. ArtSugar hopes to establish an integrated e-commerce platform to solve this problem.

The online art market has doubled since 2019, reaching a high of $12.4 billion. According to ArtSugar data, 71% of Americans plan to renovate in 2021. Since March 2020, ArtSugar's revenue has increased by 80% year on year.

According to the official website, most of the artworks sold on the ArtSugar platform are priced between US$50-400, and each piece is sold in limited quantities. Products are classified according to function, genre, color, and creator. Each artist has a separate section. Greenberg has its own set of criteria when choosing artists for collaboration: only select artists with large enough social media fans and a striking and lively style.

ArtSugar looks for the authorization of small well-known artists on Instagram, and establishes a fair profit share. The private domain traffic of each artist is also an important source for ArtSugar to accumulate users. And these products also naturally have social media attributes: users can adjust the decoration according to the platform push, without destroying the overall effect. Currently, many well-known artists including Michael Turchin, Angie Crabtree, and Betsy Enzensberger have settled on the platform.

Since 2019, ArtSugar has begun to provide all kinds of goods other than printed decorations, including luggage tags, diaries, mobile phone cases and travel bags. The category expansion is mainly because Greenberg hopes that products are not limited to decoration, but penetrate into high-frequency life scenes.